FEATURES
7 The creepy-crawlies: Avoiding CDI scope creep
11 The buck stops here: CDI escalation policies
16 Tips from the frontlines for physician engagementRead More »
By Melissa Varnavas
There’s a photo of my mom and dad from the winter of 2015, snow piles towering over them on either side. That year the Boston area received blizzard after blizzard. We still call it (with a nod to J.K. Rowling) the winter-that-shall-not-be-named.
By Laurie L. Prescott, RN, MSN, CCDS, CDIP, CRC
One pitfall many CDI professionals face is one I faced myself in my early years. As a young CDI professional, I stressed to everyone, “I am not a coder.”
I still say that to people who ask me very specific questions related to...Read More »
Scope creep is “really the whole sentiment that since we’re already in the record, we can do more and more,” says Lara Faustino, RN, BSN, CCDS, a CDI specialist at Boston Medical Center. “It happened gradually for us.”
As CDI programs mature, they move away from the easy-...Read More »
“DRG validation can mean many things in many different arenas,” Autumn Reiter, RN, BSN, CCDS, CDIP, CCS, director of CDI staffing services at TrustHCS, said on the January 3 episode of ACDIS Radio, “New approaches in DRG validation.” “Essentially, it’s ensuring a correct final...Read More »
What’s a CDI specialist to do when queries go answered? What if a physician has a backlog of unanswered queries from three weeks prior? Or what if a physician patently refuses to answer queries and says “I don’t have time” or “it’s all about the money”?
Every CDI program needs to respond to certain common physician criticisms and questions: everything from physician complaints about their lack of time to answer queries, to the accusation that CDI is only about the money.
Veteran CDI professionals often develop rote responses to these...Read More »
Everyone working in CDI knows that the job would be much easier without physician pushback—but that’s an unrealistic pipe dream, it seems. Year after year, ACDIS’ surveys turn up the same results: The number one challenge for CDI programs is always physician engagement.
